Mark Pack

At one level the legal threats by Facebook against the Daily Mail are fairly straight forward: newspaper runs horror story about a firm, firm says story is all wrong and threatens to sue for libel. At another level though this story highlights how much difference there is about correcting a story in the online sphere. The [...] »

If you look at the political blogs which are most read by MPs and political journalists, you find that they are run by a nearly all male cast: Jonathan Isaby, Tim Montgomerie, Alex Smith, Stephen Tall, myself and so on. As I wrote when looking at the impact of the internet on politics in 2010: That’s not [...] »

A quick update to my post which pointed out how the media had comprehensively misreported findings about how many people are registered to vote, painting an unduly pessimistic picture. The Evening Standard at least has now corrected its report.  »

This year we’ve tracking each month how good newspapers are at reporting their own political opinion polls. Getting your own story right isn’t perhaps the highest of bars to set newspapers, but on past experience it’s one they often seem to miss. But what’s the actual evidence? Who does best? Who does worst? In order to provide [...] »

The BBC's website regularly feature in the lists of the ten most popular websites in the UK - and are usually the only ones in the top ten from a British organisation. So the BBC's plans to refocus and shrink its web presence are likely to be widely felt. The 79 page strategy document ranges over all [...] »

Reacting to the DCMS select committee report on “Press standards, privacy and libel”, which has just been published, Chris Huhne has said: This report blows a gaping hole in the News of the World’s line that only a sole rogue reporter was involved in illegal hacking of phones, and reveals enormous worries about the feeble response of the [...] »

... but under the proposed criteria for letting bloggers have lobby passes, I wonder if several existing lobby pass holders should lose theirs: The general criteria we would agree with is that the person applying for the pass should be a proper journalist with a track record of journalism; that they should be operating for a [...] »

Cross-posted from the Mandate blog: The future for journalism is much debated in the context of declining newspaper sales and the question of whether their online operations can bring in sufficient income, whether by advertising, pay walls or other business models. But the latest ABC figures for magazine circulation shows that there are sectors of printed journalism [...] »

(Blogging this for my own convenience so I can easily find the information, but it may be of use to others too...) ComRes polled 151 MPs in April and May 2009 asking, amongst other questions, which bloggers they most respect: Conservative MPs: ConservativeHome Guido Fawkes Iain Dale Political Betting Daniel Hannan Labour MPs: Iain Dale Tom Harris Nick Robinson Guardian Guido Fawkes Liberal Democrat MPs: Political Betting Lib Dem Voice Lynne Featherstone (Because [...] »

Cross-posted from the Mandate blog: Google has just launched a new social networking service and unsurprisingly the blogs are, ahem, buzzing with discussion. If you've not yet seen it yourself, this video is an excellent quick introduction: Based on what has been seen so far, it looks like Google Buzz's biggest strength will also be its biggest [...] »